Yaseen was involved in over 40 cases of kidnapping and murder in UP and Delhi. He was an accused in robberies at Aligarh, Bhopal and Indore, reports Ravi Bajpai.

In March 1997, the Delhi Police’s Inter-state team of the Crime Branch gunned down two businessmen in Connaught Place, mistaking one of them for dreaded UP gangster Mohammed Yaseen.

Seven years later, on June 11, 2004, a Special Cell team chased two more persons near Tughlakabad's Karni Singh shooting range and shot at them. This time, they made no mistake. Yaseen and his accomplice, Benami Singh, were shot dead. With that, the cell wrapped up a long chase that began on the morning of March 31, 1997, and ended in the death of two innocent men.

About a week after the first encounter, a Crime Branch team managed to arrest Yaseen from the Moti Mahal eatery in Daryaganj. He got away soon, however. The hunt for Yaseen grew to straddle more than one state.

Yaseen was involved in over 40 cases of kidnapping and murder in UP and Delhi. He was an accused in robberies at Aligarh, Bhopal and Indore. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995, but escaped from Aligarh jail the next year. The same year, he kidnapped engineer Sauda Alam from Panchsheel Park for ransom and later killed him.

Yaseen escaped from Aligarh jail twice and once from the UP Police’s custody.

Yaseen’s run was cut short by the Delhi Police in 2004. On June 11, at about 11 pm, Special Cell policemen in three unmarked police vehicles began shadowing a silver Alto car on the Mehrauli-Badarpur stretch. They were sure they had Yaseen and knew they couldn’t afford to go wrong this time.

As Yaseen took a turn towards the Tughlakabad shooting range, he realised the police were on his trail. Yaseen sped away but lost control of his car and slammed into a tree. Yaseen and Benami got out of the car, guns blazing. The policemen opened up and soon the two criminals lay dead.